In one year, this Delhi gang cheated 2,200 Americans of ₹8 crore

Between October 2019 and Thursday, this gang had targeted 2,268 Americans of a total of $10.81 Lakh (over R8 crore), Anyesh Roy, deputy commissioner of police (cyber crime unit), said.

A group of men operating out of a fake call centre in West Delhi’s Rajouri Garden cheated hundreds of Americans by making them believe their computers needed urgent technical intervention for which they needed to cough up hundreds of dollars, Delhi Police said on Friday after arresting 17 members of the alleged gang.

Between October 2019 and Thursday, this gang had targeted 2,268 Americans of a total of $10.81 Lakh (over R8 crore), Anyesh Roy, deputy commissioner of police (cyber crime unit), said.

The unit was tipped off about the alleged crime a few days ago after which they did a technical analysis of the phone numbers used in the crime, the money trail and the location of the gang.

When they raided the fake call centre on Thursday, one of the gang members was in the mid of fooling a US doctor, said Roy. “We briefed her about the scam and saved her money, but hundreds had been cheated,” Roy added.

The officer said the alleged mastermind of the gang was 27-year-old Sahil Dilavari, who had been running the fake call centre for the last three years. Some of the others arrested were his associates while the rest were callers, but all of them were aware they were doing a fraud, said the officer.

The modus operandi was to send a pop-up on the computers of Americans that showed their systems were compromised. The pop-up message was accompanied by helpline numbers that were falsely showed to be belonging to a software company which they could call to seek remedies, police said.

“Whenever any of those potential victims called back to seek help, this gang would seek remote access to their computers. They would then tell the Americans that their computers were infested with malware and spywares that could compromise their banking credentials,” said Roy.

The gang would allegedly seek hundreds of dollars as payment for rectifying problems that did not exist .

“Sometimes, they even managed to sell them long-term subscriptions for keeping their computers safe, but in reality they didn’t offer any service in return,” said the DCP.

Another alleged modus operandi of this gang was to put up online advertisements, pretending to be the technical team for a popular printer manufacturing company.

“The advertisement would carry a fake toll-free number of the firm, a number that would eventually lead printer owners to this gang. Thereafter, the process of cheating them was the same,” the DCP said.

The payments would be received in the accounts of shell companies based in America and Canada, the DCP said, adding the money would then be wired to the Indian accounts of the suspects.

The police are probing how the gang managed to set up such an elaborate system to send those pop-ups on the computers of Americans and then set up shell companies there.